Emmett Till's Lot

The unfair death of 15-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 was an appalling episode of American history which sowed trepidation throughout the country, but also sparked, or rather favoured, the Civil Rights movement. Many would now argue that it was the the microcosm of what American society looked like back then. 

In 1955, 15-year-old Emmett Till, a teenaged African-American born and raised in Chicago, got on a train to go to Mississippi to visit relatives. He had never travelled to the South, it was his first trip there. He perceived this trip as an opportunity to discover a new place. He was significantly ecstatic. Before embarking on the train, Emmett’s mother warned her son that he would have to abide by the rules, and never disrespect a white person in Mississippi. She feared that her son could end up being put in harm’s way in the South. 

At that time, in the Jim Crow Era, racial segregation plagued the country, and more bitterly the Deep South, a southern part of the US that had been home to slavery centuries prior. The Deep South was known for enforcing more stringent rules, targeting African-Americans. It was home to many killings and lynchings of African-Americans. 

But Emmett reassured his mother, telling her that he’d be cautious. Once in Mississippi, he worked very hard all day long in cotton fields with his kith and kin, under the sweltering temperatures of the South. What a pleasant activity for an energy-brimming boy. He was very delighted to discover new horizons. But one day, everything changed. He got into a grocery store held by the Bryant family. He found the shopkeeper, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, gorgeous and whistled at her in a flirtatious manner. It was neither out of disrespect nor intent on offending her. He was just a young boy from the North who had just complimented an unknown woman. She could have appreciated his compliment, but that was not the case. Instead, his behaviour was deemed derogatory, and Carolyn dashed to the back room to fetch a gun. She aimed at the young boy in an attempt to shoot him down. But, she missed her aim, and Emmett and his relatives hastily drove away, hit by terror. Emmett remained at his great-uncle's house for some days, trying to lay low. However, Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behaviour for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. Days later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted Till. He was blamed for offending Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. He was ruthlessly lynched and dumped into the Mississippi River. Emmett's holidays turned into a nightmare! His corpse was dredged up a few days later, trained back to Chicago. It goes without saying that it was a huge shock for his mother. She lost her unique son. 15 years of life vanished off the Earth. Because of narrow-mindedness. Because of racism. His mother insisted that the casket would be open so that everyone could see the unimaginable level of barbarism which her son had died from. Emmett’s face was mutilated and heavily deformed. Thousands of people attended the funeral, and hesitantly approached the open casket, many of them passed out, hit by shock and horror. Photographs of the open casket were published in black-oriented newspapers, rallying support and sympathy across the United States, and even the whole world. In parallel, in September 1955, an all-white jury found Bryant not guilty of Till's murder. The death of Emmett Till ignited outrage throughout the country, and greatly propelled the Civil Rights movement. Till posthumously became an icon of the fight against racial segregation in the US.

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